[quoteWatching Inception (2010) is like being bludgeoned to death with an ice mallet. In sadly predictable fashion, Christopher Nolan takes the film from an interesting beginning to a painfully convoluted and unsatisfying finish. The result is a film that thinks it's a lot more clever and complex than it really is.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an expert at stealing ideas from people's minds via their dreams. Will doing such a job on industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe), Cobb's cover is blown, and he and sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are shanghaied into doing a different job for Saito: to plant an idea in the head of rival businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and bring down his business empire. Cobb and Arthur assemble a new team, including weapons guy Eames (Tom Hardy), a chemist/sleep expert (Dillip Rao) and an architectural student (Ellen Page) to pull it off. Things quickly become complicated when Cobb's own memories of his wife (Marion Cotillard) begin interfering with the dreamworld, and when heavily-armed "security" forces show up to wipe our protagonists out.

It must be said that Inception starts off very well. The first 80 minutes or so are engrossing and promise a superb movie. There's lots of talk and exposition - it wouldn't be a Nolan film if there weren't - but the talk is interesting, and we have a nice cross-section of characters assembled for the job. The concept of the movie is fascinating, and the early scenes of dream-exploring create high hopes for the main story. It's set up as a cerebral heist film with a sci-fi twist, and by God it looks like it will be fun to go along for the ride.

Once the actual job gets under way, however, Inception begins to unravel. By the time we've penetrated a third level of reality, the movie has devoured its own tail, only to keep going until it bursts out its own stomach. The pace becanes schizophrenic, trying to balance long dialogue scenes with action and the layers of reality are awkwardly juggled. The dreams themselves, aside from a few nice bits early on, are flat and bereft of wonder: compared to Shutter Island's bizarre phantasmagorias, Inception's aren't remotely convincing and undermine the facile musings about "the nature of reality." Nolan falls back on action movie cliches to pad out the run time, with a shoot-'em-up finale that wouldn't be out of place in a Die Hard or Bond flick. Nolan spends half the film building up our expectations only to steer it off a cliff.

Perhaps most irritating of all is the screenplay. Nolan's hamfisted homilies in The Dark Knight got a bit grating, but didn't seriously detract from the film. Unfortunately, Inception is largely sunk by its script, a shining example of obvious storytelling. Everything is spelled out in the most excrutiating detail: backstory, key plot points, everything that's going on. The twist involving Cobb could have been interesting were it not handled with awkward, clunky and long montages and monologues. It's not that the film is confusing or hard to follow; far from it, with everything hammered into the audience's skull, even the densest viewer can fully grasp what's going on. A complete lack of humor or ambiguity and one-note characters don't help either. Nolan either needs to acquaint himself with the concept of subtlety, or get someone else to write his movies.

Nolan's direction is mostly good. The action scenes are a mixed bag: some are creative and interesting - Arthur's zero-gravity showdown with dream-world thugs - others more banal and generic, though at least we're spared obnoxious shaky cam and quick-editing. The pace is a bit uneven, with the movie awkwardly balancing action and exposition within the same scenes, but flows reasonably well. A major weak point is Hans Zimmer's strikingly banal score: the talented composer who gave us the scores for The Lion King, Crimson Tide and Pirates of the Caribbean has been reduced to repetitive, mind-numbing mixtures of insistent strings and loud electronic noise.

Nolan does his ensemble cast few favors, though a few manage to shine. Leonardo DiCaprio has the only meaty role and he nails it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) and Tom Hardy (Black Hawk Down) are good, and Ellen Paige (Juno) divests herself of her usual obnoxious persona. Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies) mostly has to be sad and pretty, both of which she nails. Cillian Murphy and Ken Watanabe mostly bring baggage from previous Nolan films. Michael Caine and Tom Berenger (Rough Riders) are squandered in the tiniest of bit parts.

Inception is ultimately a big, fat, mindfucking disappointment. That it starts off so well makes its ultimate mediocrity that much more frustrating. ][/quote]

I guess you're not supposed to think about stuff like that while marvelling at how "complex" and "deep" (read: pretentious and self-important) it all is. I'm really baffled at how taken people are by this film's alleged "brilliance." Have they never seen a movie in their lives that requires a modicum of thought or patience? (I'm not sure Inception does, really, since it explains everything in excrutiating detail. But anyway.) A bunch of my friends had Facebook statuses to this effect and I had to restrain myself from posting something sarcastic on their wall.

8/10I rather liked it. It's a good action flick for most of the time. 2,5 hours is a long running time for movie but I wasn't bored once. But it's not a masterpiece of cinema. It's a fuckin' action movie, people! It's not complex and deep, it's not even intelligent. Geez, it's not even logical except according to its own "logic". But neither is Star Wars. And that's a good scifi action movie too. The biggest difference between Star Wars and Inception is that some people take Inception waaaaay too seriously... Oh, wait! There is no difference!

Its all a dream. How do you know its a dream? Because it got a 9.4 rating. I'm waiting for a train. Its bringing a real rating of a 4. But the train doesn't come. This is not my dream. Omg. I'm going to wake up, and the real rating will be a 4, like reality. Reality as it should be, if movies were properly rated. But there's an explosion. The movie is still rated a 9.4. If I jump, maybe out of a window and die in my dream, which is someone else's dream, I might wake up to get the real rating of this movie, a 4. The van falls, I'm drowning. Finally after a long long long time, I wake up. Thank god it was all a dream. I check the rating at IMDb. OMG NO! I must still be in someone else's dream.

As the big blockbuster movies become more awful, their rating consistently get higher. Any time I see a high rated (7+) new movie on a major rating website I become suspicious now. Too many times I've wasted money on crap movies because the rating said it was good. I guess they decided to push it to the limits of a 10 this time to really fool people like me that are becoming wary.

The movie deserves about a 4 out of 10. The 4 is given for the nice colors and pretty good graphics. However, the plot is weak, the characters are weak, its not thought provoking or intellectual. There's no brilliant script or any new directional style here. And it feels longer than a run on sentence.

Long. Boring. Jumbled. Good concept and stars wasted on this movie. See it if you have to, but don't spend money on it. Every time we spend money to see bad movies it sends a message that we are willing to accept less, and pay more. Your money is your real vote. Only vote for what is good.

Just think how much better it would have been if the dreamscapes were more fantastical Dali-esque rather than the pedestrian contemporary crapola.

Logged

"When you feel that rope tighten on your neck you can feel the devil bite your ass"!